“When are you going to talk about branding?” We have had more than one participant ask us that during a break in one of our Grassroots Strategy Workshops. Their observation is based on the fact that we are discussing “Strategic Marketing” and yet do not have a session that speaks specifically to brand – in fact, we never have.

We usually answer politely that brand is different in business to business (which it is), and ask them to try to think deeper about the value of their brand from the customer’s perspective. But until now, we haven’t really put our logic on paper.

In truth, we believe that many B2B companies waste a lot of timing talking about brand (brand strategy, brand positioning, sub-brands, etc.) without understanding what brand means to their customers.  We have had many project teams propose “Strong brand name” as a value element, only to have their customers fail to remember their brand at all, or worse yet, equate it with quality issues or late shipments.

We distinctly remember one client whose marketing manager overflowed with consumer marketing language and logic for investing in their brand. We suspected that this emphasis on brand positioning was misplaced and had that suspicion dramatically confirmed when we talked to customers in the segment where they were most successful and learned that many of the purchasing decision-makers could not even pronounce our client’s brand name! These customers bought from our client because they offered a competitive price and industry-leading technical support, it didn’t matter that they couldn’t pronounce the brand, much less tell you what image it evoked.

In consumer marketing, so much time and energy is spent understanding and shaping brand image that there must be some lessons that apply to B2B, right? In truth, we have to admit there are a few similarities.

Similarities with Consumer Branding

• Brand is shorthand for your promise to the customer – in B2B as well as B2C, brand can be a convenient way of representing what attributes a customer should expect from your offering  and different brands come with different expectations. Linking the brand to a powerful value proposition can be particularly impactful. A historical example of this was “No-one ever got fired for buying from IBM.”  This was a powerful phrase that captured the promise for a CIO when deciding which vendor to choose – “IBM may not always have the best technical solution, but we are the standard among your peers and we will always be here to support you.”
• Brand represents the entire customer experience –consumers  understand that Mercedes is different than KIA in more ways than just the physical product;just like B2B buyers understand that SAP is different than NetSuite in more ways than just the functionality of the system itself.
• In the end, your customers dictate what your brand represents – this lesson has been learned the hard way by consumer marketing companies that like to think that they can shape consumer opinion – just ask the brand management team at Bud Light! But it is true in B2B as well, if what your customers see is quality problems and late shipments then that is what your brand means, no matter what you say on your website.

These similarities are important, but the reason we exercise caution using consumer analogies in B2B is that the differences are bigger, and not always obvious even to people who think they know ‘marketing.’

Differences with Consumer Branding

• Brand lags vs. leads the marketing mix – In consumer marketing, clever brand positioning can make or break a product – consider Corona beer over that last 35 plus years. Its success is almost completely due to its positioning as a ‘beach vacation in a bottle,’ not its taste. In the B2B world, this doesn’t work. Your customers have engineers and finance teams who actually expect your offering to do the job they hired it for. Unlike in consumer marketing, clever branding can’t convince customers of the importance of attributes that are not relevant to their business.
• Positioning vs. Differentiation – As with Corona, consumer products seek a unique positioning in the consumer mind-space, an emotional appeal to a distinctive psycho-graphic segment. What matters most in B2B is not positioning (what we want), but differentiation – what is actually true about the relative performance of your offering. Unlike in consumer marketing clever branding cannot create differention for a me-too product.
• Emotional needs vs. Economic needs – given the differences above, the segmentation challenge is different in B2B as well. Good B2B segmentation schemes are based largely on economic needs (why would some customers pay more than others for a specific benefit?) rather than emotional needs. Unlike in consumer marketing, segmentation should not be based on psychographic research but should be based on an understanding of the business model and cost structures of your customer base.
• Mass communication vs. one-on-one – brand advertising is critical in consumer marketing because you largely communicate to your customer en masse, and have to break through the noise to even get their attention. In B2B marketing, unlike consumer, you almost always have the opportunity to customize your message and value proposition to the specific customer – even if it is only a web-based interaction, you can curate the customer journey based on individual needs in a way that you cannot do in a 30 second television commercial.
• CMO controls marketing vs. CMO orchestrates market understanding – in most consumer companies, the CMO is really the chief branding officer – they set brand standards and allocation marketing dollars across the media mix. Good B2B CMOs recognize that they can have a bigger impact by helping their product managers shape their entire offerings through a deep understanding of their markets than they can by merely controlling the marketing mix (also they usually have a much smaller advertising budget).

Conclusion

We have barely touched on many of these topics and could probably turn several of these bullet points into blog posts of their own. But we are confident that branding is both different and less important in B2B markets. Like many of our clients, we love a good B2C story – they are easy to relate to and fun to tell. There are lessons in many of the B2C stories that we use in our workshops, but we are careful not to overplay the analogies.

B2B marketing is different for all the reasons we’ve outlined above, and using B2C techniques can often lead you astray. We have seen too many companies hire a CMO with a consumer product background. They come in and talk a good game around positioning and demand a bigger marketing budget, but never really develop an understanding of the market in a way that gets to unmet needs and drives innovation. The result is usually disastrous – organizational conflict, wasted marketing spend and market share loss as competitors find new opportunities faster.

Join the conversation – what have you experienced when B2C principles are applied in B2B markets?